


Hindsight

by ErrantNight



Series: Binary Dawn [1]
Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Anakin just wants everyone else to be happy, Angst, Character Death, Fix-It, Gen, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-02-15 01:53:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13020747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErrantNight/pseuds/ErrantNight
Summary: Anakin died on Mustafar, he contemplates where he went wrong...





	1. Void

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I really am working on my Luke AU. The problem is I had so much back story written that I realized I need to write that as a fic first. But the plan is to have it all written and get a beta reader before I post even one chapter of that. 
> 
> Sorry if there is any weird formatting, I don't have a laptop right now and wrote this on my phone!

Anakin Skywalker, briefly Darth Vader of the Sith, died on Mustafar. There was no 'certain point of view' about it. Dead was dead, or it should have been, but when had his life ever been easy? 

He had a lot of time to think about things, or maybe it was a few moments that were so clear with bitter hindsight that the conclusions he came to seemed to take forever. 

He could snort at the appellation of 'Darth' that Palpatine, or Sidious, whatever, had so very quickly bestowed on him. How very ridiculous. He'd been handed that as an appeasement of his gluttonous ego, the desperate desire for mastery he'd believed he was ready for. It was ludicrous, and the desire for a grand title and responsibility proved he'd never been ready for it. 

He remembered that the weight on Obi-Wan's shoulders had seemed to grow heavier when he'd earned the title. Hadn't asked for or wanted it. That was probably how they'd known he was ready for it. That was maturity, and Anakin had been a mewling kath pup trying to lead the pack. 

There was no doubt that his immaturity, his preening belief in his own superiority, and the idiocy of listening to a man who'd fostered and encouraged the worst parts of him had doomed the galaxy. 

He'd done terrible things, and even with the clear hindsight of death couldn't fully understand why. He knew he'd done it, had razed the temple and murdered children who'd looked up to him. Who a few days before he'd literally spoken to and promised to come and help with a lesson. 

He'd been taught that the dark side changed those who touched it, knew the stories. Exar Kun, Ulic Qel-Droma, Xanatos, more names and tales that he'd thought of as cautionary. Even though he'd seen it first hand in Count Dooku, in other Jedi who'd turned during the war, he'd smugly assumed that they'd been weak. They'd always harbored selfish and evil thoughts, the dark side was just their excuse. He'd been so wrong, and now so many had paid a price he could never make better. 

He took full responsibility, and the void mocked him. He couldn't undo this, couldn't scuff his feet on the council room floor and apologize no matter his sincerity. 

That was why he rested alone here, set just outside the peace of the Force. It had created him, and now it rejected him. And he deserved it.


	2. Petition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wasn’t he supposed to be the so called chosen one? If he’d been chosen to bring balance, and he’d failed, would someone else now have that destiny? And wasn’t it a kriffed up destiny, worse now than before?

Even after coming to all of his bleak conclusions, admitting that everything that had gone wrong in his life was his fault, he had idiotic moments where he backslid into the oh so familiar mindset that everyone else was just as responsible 

He could blame Qui-Gon, first of all. He’d so admired the man from the day they’d met. He’d spend many years looking up to the memory of him, but now he thought perhaps he’d looked up to the idea of Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn. He hadn’t really known the man and had learned things many years after his death that had damaged what he thought he knew.

Obi-Wan had thought the world of Qui-Gon, he’d been like a father to him. Everyone said that, but it wasn’t entirely true. The man had damaged Anakin’s relationship to the new Knight and hadn’t lived to see the consequences of his abrupt abandonment of his Padawan before the Jedi High Council. A relationship which from all accounts had begun with rejection, and then ended with it, making the intervening years suddenly doubted and questioned by a young man who had to hide his grief behind tight shields. 

Obi-Wan hadn’t wanted Anakin, in fact it had hurt him just to look at him, so sure, he could lay the shaky beginning of his relationship to his master at Qui-Gon’s feet. But Anakin had been just as hard on Obi-Wan, sneaking out at all hours of the night and purposely ‘not understanding’ some of those early lessons on attachment that felt wrong, wrong, wrong. Still… still felt wrong. 

He could blame Obi-Wan next, who’s resentment had bled into the first three years of their partnership. But when Anakin had turned thirteen years old, when he’d been brought before the Council for the second time in an official capacity, he’d told him he wanted him to stay. He’d had a chance to leave then, upon reaching the Republic standard age of majority for humans, and he’d chosen to stay. So even though he resented Obi-Wan as much as he loved him as a brother, he couldn’t blame him either.

He had to admit there that maybe there was a little room for blame to go around...

At that thought a flood of everything he’d done wrong in his life crowded into his brain and it felt like he screamed, though there was still no hint of sound. Everything, every petty thing, and wasn’t that particularly unfair? 

Striking another of the children who lived in the hovels of the slave quarters, heat and hunger making tempers short and little quarrels seem more important than they were. 

Stealing food from a market stall, only to find out later that the slave who’d been watching the goods was beaten for the theft.

On and on, every person he’d hurt - from the smallest instance of saying something cruel when he could have been kind, up to stepping into creche and igniting his blade - it was a flood he couldn’t stop. He would have anyway, wasn’t this supposed to be hell? It wasn’t unfair at all, it was perfectly deserved.

.That the destruction of the Jedi, the Republic, and… and his wife and unborn child, had all been done at his own hands, that couldn’t be denied.

If he could fix everything, he would. He would do it all over again, make better choices, he knew he was capable of it. Wasn’t he supposed to be the so called chosen one? If he’d been chosen to bring balance, and he’d failed, would someone else now have that destiny? And wasn’t it a kriffed up destiny, worse now than before? 

::Would you?::

A thought cut through this new cycle of self recrimination. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought all these things, not even the 10th. That was his hell, to come to all these realizations again and again and be totally helpless to do anything about it.

“Yes,” he said, it wasn’t even a question he had to think about.

::Will you?::

That was hard, not so quickly answered, and he thought about it. What would he change if he went back? His first instinct was selfish and he winced, but then it was a sort of enlightened selfishness because it involved saving his mother and Padme first of all. But the second one, that hurt a little, because saving Padme definitely involved protecting her from himself. He’d pursued her, become more than a little obsessed with her. That had gotten her killed, and the life they’d made together as well. That wouldn’t happen if he could do it again, but he wasn’t sure if he could keep himself from being her friend. 

Saving his mother, well if anyone deserved to have a better ending to their story it was Shmi. Everything in her life had been hard edged and bitter, except maybe loving her son. That warmed him, but if he managed to save her he still might never see her again once he’d made sure she was safe.

After that, well, he wasn’t sure about any certain plan. He’d be a Jedi again, wouldn’t he? Try to be a better one, anyway. Yoda’s voice again, with the doing instead of the trying. He smiled, wry and self depricating.

“Yes,” he said, then added, “please?”

There was no answer, simply more silence and nothingness.

He swore quietly in Huttese, falling back on the old standard ‘e chu ta!’

He felt something nudge his arm, and heat swamped him. Sound and light followed as sweat stuck his tunic to his back, and the feel of rough fabric against his cheek. Voices crowded in around him, painful and familiar. Basic, Twi’lek, Huttese, Rodian, other languages he couldn’t make out or remember more than one or two words of. The streets of Mos Espa. 

“Ani! I certainly never taught you that,” a warm voice, mock scandalized, admonished him, “and I’d better not hear you say it again. I don’t care how funny you think it sounds, it’s awful.” 

“Mom?” Anakin jerked his head up, hair falling golden and dirty into his face as he looked into his mother’s eyes. She was afraid, but hiding it well.

She opened her mouth to answer, then shut it into a tight, worried line as another familiar voice rasped back at them. Called out over a blue shoulder blurred by the leathery wings fluttering to hold Watto aloft.

“C’mon, hurry it up before I change my mind, yeah?” 

Anakin clutched his mother’s arm, then swallowed a lump in his throat. He looked down… the ground looked rather far away from where his legs were wrapped around his mother’s hip.

He bit his tongue from repeating the epithet, keeping all of his swearing firmly behind his teeth...


	3. Home, Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little different POV

Watto kept up a stream of gruff complaints all the way from Gardulla the Hutt’s stronghold to the door of his shop. The slimy matriarch had dragged him out to get his winnings in the hottest part of the day when he usually took his nap, a petty little payback for winning a bet against her. It wasn’t even that good of a prize, a human female wasn’t as attractive to him as it was to other beings on Tatooine but she had a pleasant enough face from what he could tell. That sort of thing was good to have behind a counter and Gardulla’s accountant claimed she was ‘good enough’ with mechanics which would have to be ‘good enough’. 

He sighed, pointing at a few things on a shelf that he wouldn’t mind being rid of for awhile, they were covered in dust and grime anyway and hadn’t sold, “Eh, yeah grab that and that, maybe that too,” he said, waving at a little grav sled leaned on it’s side against the wall behind the counter. He kicked it over and it activated, hovering a few inches from the ground on whining and sputtering repulsorlifts. He gave a rather wary look to the little human he’d also inadvertently won, thrown in because Gardulla had no use for a kid slave and none of her other people would have wanted to take care of it either. While Hutts had no problems using and selling adults for all sorts of unsavory things a few of them had notions about what children were for. Gardulla, maybe having been a mother herself, didn’t mistreat kids that way. He couldn’t tell what gender the kid was, that was always hard to tell with other species, long floppy hair and skinny bodies all of them unless someone had shaved their head to get rid of parasites.

The slave, what was her name… Shmi yeah, loaded up the household items he’d picked out. A couple of flat heating plates for cooking, a small heavy cooler that only half worked but was good enough to keep things from spoiling if you didn’t leave it in too long, and pieces of a dismantled vaporator his last slave had never quite gotten fixed before he’d lost him in a bet to that smuggler. He wasn’t heartless, if she couldn’t get it working he’d get them one that did. But it was a good way to figure out if she was good at the work after all.

He tapped his fingers on the counter, wings coming to rest as he plopped down onto the well padded stool behind it. The little one helped its mother with the smaller items, hefting them in its thin arms onto the hovering sled and pushing them into place a little to keep the rickety thing balanced. Its mother touched its hair absently as she thanked it, and the look on its face was pure adoration - Watto could at least tell that much. He wasn’t totally unable to read the expressions of humans at least.

They both turned their faces to him when the sled was loaded, Shmi’s face smooth and blank and the little one’s striving to match. 

“Alright, C’mon, I got a place for you, eh?” He said, heaving himself up with rapid beats of his leathery wings, “S’not far, district slave quarters is not too bad, not like those dungeons the Hutts have at least yeah?”

He led the way, beckoning with one hand as Shmi loaded the kid onto the sled with all the other things, ignoring the protest that “I can walk!”

The sputtering sound of the repulsorlift followed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you think he's in character?


End file.
